Anki on macOS
Every word you look up is filed together with the line it turned up in, while you are still reading. When you want a deck, select the words, choose a card layout, look at the preview, and export. Anki imports the file the normal way. Nothing gets typed twice.
Building a card by hand takes about a minute. Copy the word, open Anki, pick a deck, choose a note type, paste, write a definition, try to remember the sentence, paste that too.
A minute is nothing. A minute times thirty words is why the list stays in a note app and never becomes a deck.
Batching it later is worse. By Sunday you have the word but not the reason you wanted it, and the sense you needed is gone.
Press ⌥A and box a word wherever you found it. It gets looked up in the sense the surrounding sentence is using, and both go into your library together. That takes a second and you carry on reading.
The deck comes later. Select what you want in the library, pick the fields and the style, and export. The work that normally kills the habit has already happened, one word at a time, at the moment each word mattered.
A PDF, an ebook, a web page, a subtitle, a screenshot, a paper laid out in two columns. Leafy reads the screen, so the source never has to cooperate and no extension has to support the site.
One deck stays a plan. The other fills up while you read.
The word, the definition, and the line it turned up in. You pick which fields appear and which of the four layouts to use, and the card is drawn for you before anything is written to disk.
That preview matters more than it sounds. Most bad imports are only discovered after five hundred cards are already in the deck.
The same selection exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or PDF. The PDF has its own styles, for people who would rather print the list or read down it than review it.
It reads CSV and XLSX back in too, with a preview of the file before it imports, so a deck built elsewhere can move in.
Anki is a very good scheduler and there is no reason to rebuild it. The part that goes wrong for most people is upstream: the card never gets made, so there is nothing to schedule.
It is also an export rather than a live connection. You get a file and you import it, which takes one more click than a button that talks to Anki directly.
Your library stays on your Mac. No account, no sync server, no ads. The text you scan goes out to an AI so it can explain the word as your sentence uses it, with nothing attached that says who you are, and the privacy page lists exactly what is sent.
Free while Leafy is in beta. One download, no account, macOS 14 and up.
Download for MacAlso worth a look: getting your Kindle words out, scanned PDFs, or why looked up words never stick.